I sh*t you not, but this got me onto the lisp train: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM1Zb3xmvMc while surfing for no reason.After that I googled around and found Racket, what I use since about a year for inhouse scripting.

Now I'm diving into common lisp. Therefore I'm learning Emacs too, because of reasons.

My functional programming story started with learning Haskell just over a year ago. Initially, I found wrapping my head around functional programming concepts insanely difficult... but, one day, it all just sort of clicked, and everything fell into place, and it has sort of become a natural way of thinking about programming now. Every time I go back to an imperative language, I think about how much easier it would be to implement the same thing in a functional language.

Anyway, a couple of months ago, I decided to step up to learning a Lisp dialect, as I had heard much lore about it being "God's chosen language" and whatever. I decided to learn Clojure.

It really gave me a new perspective. It made me see Haskell more like baby's first functional programming language, rather than seeing it as some complicated language that not many people would understand - it seemed both lacking in power, but also unnecessarily complex (especially in its dense syntax) compared to Lisp.

I am only now just starting to learn Common Lisp (SBCL), but if it weren't for my initial venture in learning Clojure, I wouldn't have discovered the joy that is writing Lisp in Emacs, and I would have remained a firm Vim believer.